Portrait of a driver: Sue MacGregor

The stalwart of Radio 4's Today programme talks to Harry Mount

If there's any possible consolation for the misery of getting up at 3am every morning for 18 years, at least the streets are nice and empty. "I used to be picked up in Camden at 3.30 and got to White City in about 12 minutes," says Sue MacGregor, the longest-serving presenter of Radio 4's Today programme until her departure last year.

"There was a full set of papers in the back and the driver got trained not to natter at me. Still, I could only ever skim-read. Jim Naughtie got in, having filleted all the papers, including the columnists. 'Did you see what Matthew Parris wrote this morning?'" she says in a passable impression of Naughtie's Scottish accent.

When the programme finished each morning, she then had a driver to take her back home, so she has only used cars for fun during the past two decades. And she thinks her Honda Civic is tremendous fun.

"It's got that very soft American ride. It's really nice for long trips, particularly if you're like me and you've got a slightly dicky back. I enjoy the feeling of being safe in my little pod. It's very comfortable and you can hardly hear the engine."

So she can concentrate on listening to Radio 4? "Yes... and Radio 3; Classic FM. Mostly fairly serious stuff. And Radio 2, when it's mushy — I like Desmond Carrington. I'm not so keen on Steve Wright — his natural home is Radio 1."

The immaculately turned out MacGregor drives me around Regent's Park in exactly the way you'd expect – safely, smoothly, with a ramrod-straight back. "I like having a practically vertical seat. I don't like leaning back."

Her first car, in South Africa — where she was brought up and began her career on the South African Broadcasting Company's Woman's World — was a Hillman Imp. "Funny little car with a boxy roof. It cost £650 in the mid-1960s and was desperately unreliable, spending more time in the garage than on the road. It was my first and last British car."

Since then, it's been Japanese all the way. On arriving in London in the late 1960s, she bought the first of several Datsuns. "They were efficient and reliable, and British Leyland was about to go down the tubes."

Her taste for all things Japanese was in the face of stiff opposition from her father, a neurologist who was in the 14th Army in Burma in the Royal Army Medical Corps. "He would buy neither a Japanese nor a German car. He took a violent dislike to what they did to his brother-in-law, who was on the Changi railway and never recovered."

Towards the end of his life, even her father relented, driving a Toyota at the age of 86. His daughter's affections have also hardened, although it is Hondas that ended up winning her heart, first an Accord, then a Prelude and a brace of Civics.

She's never had any problems with the current one, but garages it for "a handsome sum of money". Her house, tucked behind the Nash terraces of Regent's Park, is near to the rougher parts of Camden Town, despite her illustrious immediate neighbours.

"Sven-Goran Eriksson lives round the corner. And Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman hired one of these," she says, taking her hand off the steering wheel for a millisecond to point out a large cream stucco villa, "when they were making Eyes Wide Shut."

MacGregor is now back on the roving beat for the BBC — from places as far afield as Cambodia and South Africa — but she still doesn't use her car much for work, even when she was promoting her recent paperback. "I travelled by train everywhere. So it was very easy." Even when the press got hold of the news of her affair with Leonard Rossiter? "I could hardly take against the questions. I had written about it."

The only time she gets into a flap in her Honda is in traffic. "I get incredibly annoyed. One of my nieces claims that I leant out of the window and shouted, 'Oh, you...' at somebody. Then I remembered where I was and shouted, 'Oaf'. What an idiotic word!"

• Woman of Today (Headline, paperback) by Sue MacGregor is available for £7·99.